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Camille Paglia Discusses 'Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism'

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Camille Paglia Discusses 'Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism' Camille Paglia discusses 'Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism' [00:00:05] Welcome to The Seattle Public Library’s podcasts of author readings and library events. Library podcasts are brought to you by The Seattle Public Library and Foundation. To learn more about our programs and podcasts, visit our web site at w w w dot SPL dot org. To learn how you can help the library foundation support The Seattle Public Library go to foundation dot SPL dot org [00:00:30] Good evening everybody. I'm Stesha Brandon. I'm the Literature and Humanities Program Manager here at Seattle Public Library. Welcome to the Central Library. And to tonight's event with Camille Paglia. Thank you to Elliott Bay Book Company for inviting us to co present this evening we would also like to thank our author series sponsor Gary Kunis and the Seattle Times for their generous supports for library programs. Private gifts to the Seattle Public Library Foundation also help provide programs and services that touch the lives of everybody in our community. So if any of you are at Library Foundation donors thanks so much for that. Now let me turn the podium over to Rick Simonson from Elliott Bay Book Company to introduce the rest of the program. [00:01:09] Thank you. Thanks Deborah. So tonight we are delighted to have [00:01:14] Camille Paglia here and I will do a more formal introduction than usual but Camille Paglia is the University Professor of Humanities and media studies at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia where she has taught since 1984. She received her B.A. from the State University of New York at Binghamton in 1968 and her master's in philosophy and degrees from Yale University in 1971 and 1974 respectively. Prior books are sexual persona art and decadence from never Tedi to Emily Dickinson which came out in nineteen ninety six. Art in American culture vamps and tramps. New essays which came out nineteen ninety for the birds a study of Alfred Hitchcock published in 1998 by the British Film Institute break blow burn. Camille Paglia reads 43 of the world's best poems and glittering images of a book. She was here last year with five years ago glittering images a journey through art from Egypt to Star Wars she's here this evening with her seventh book Free Women free men sex gender feminism a selection of her most notable articles and lectures on these subjects her third general essay collection will be out a year from this fall from pop Pantheon the publisher that's been publishing and works in Sexual Personae Professor Polly was co founding contributor and columnist for Salon Salon dot com beginning with his debut issue in nineteen ninety five. She's written numerous articles on art literature popular culture feminism religion education and politics for www.spl.org/podcasts l 206-386-4636 publications around the world. It's a pleasure to thank you all for being here tonight. And now please join in welcoming back to Seattle. [00:02:58] Camille Paglia Well hello. [00:03:11] I don't know which way to use first here is what a pleasure to be back in this beautiful city. The first time I came for a book tour here I think was 1992. And it's just always a thrill to come back to Seattle. So this is my seventh book and I had hoped it was going to be my third essay collection because it's been 1994 since my second one was published. I've written so many things all over the world. I think many important pieces on religion and history and culture and so on. But my publisher felt that my pieces on sex gender and feminism have been so prophetic for the last 25 and 30 years that it was urgent to get them out now. So we went forward with this book and it's absolutely amazing how almost like a tsunami events in the culture swept forward and things I wrote in my introduction to this book last summer when I wrote introduction seemed to speak directly to this moment at my premiere principles as a person and as a thinker are free thought and free speech. I am truly a child of the 1960s in that respect and I am totally opposed to any kind of curtailment of either of those two things. For whatever laudable social causes intimate anyone may think that they have my particular influences came from my experience in the mid 1960s in college when I entered college 1964 and the fall that spring had happened. [00:04:51] The Free Speech Movement at Berkeley Mario Savio is an enormous culture hero to me. In college my influences were heavily the Beat poets who created the great scandal City Lights bookshop in 1957 the obscenity trial of the arrest of of the manager of City Lights Bookstore 4th for selling obscene poem Allen Ginsberg's Howl Kaddish. These were huge influences on me in college the same thing. Lenny Bruce Lenny Bruce who is the person who transformed the medium of comedy standup comedy from merely gags in the vaudeville style to a very satiric a celibate but meaningful style of analysis of social problems. He's he's Lenny Bruce is the one who made comedy politically and socially relevant. Lenny Bruce was an equal opportunity offender. He went against both liberal and conservative shibboleths. And then the first I really you had an enormous impact on me in adolescence was Oscar Wilde by chance in a second hand bookstore in Syracuse upstate New York. I stumbled on a copy of a book called was a British book called the epigrams of Oscar Wilde and it actually is still available from the Dover editions. They thought presumably that no one in the US would recognize the word epigram so they call it now the wit and humor of Oscar Wilde but it had has all of his many of his wonderful one liners from his plays from his writings from his dinner table and conversation in London organized by topic nature men and women etc. [00:06:37] etc.. Oh this is the scathing uncompromising quality of Oscar Wilde's thinking huge impact on me. And then in college it was. This was before the Stonewall rebellion before the gay liberation movement. Gay men. Once they were absolutely scathing. Going against every possible social convention they would say things that make you wince about polio victims and so on. Now what happened to that. After Stonewall. Gay men have become increasingly either recreational and hedonistic gay or they have become very P.C. and politicised. So all of a sudden they're part of you know of you know of the Army for the control of speech. But you know I think you know an 2 underground gay men are still just as bitchy as ever and I'm happy to say. But then in college and graduate school I began to read also the influences on Oscar Wilde himself which would be both labor. And market Assad who was imprisoned for for the way he defied convention etc.. It wasn't that long before I was in college that there was the great trial for obscenity in England. But Lady Chatterley's Lover pink Penguin Books it was was brought up on charges of obscenity and went in when Penguin Books triumphed. It was a great blow for you know against the forces of censorship. So that's what I have stood for. [00:08:01] And my particular wing of feminism was suppressed for for many years the feminism predates second wave feminism which was created by Betty Friedan with the with her co founding of now. [00:08:17] In 1966 I was already a feminist because I was directly impacted by first wave feminism in the early 1960s when 1961 when I was 14 years old I suddenly became obsessed with Amelia Earhart after an article about yet another clue was found whatever it was that was in the Syracuse Herald Journal and I embarked on a three year research project in high school into Amelia Earhart. I went to I went to all kinds of places like ransacked the VA the old newspapers and in the bowels of the Syracuse library and so on. And also I was I was obsessed with Katharine Hepburn whom I whom I began to I saw on late night TV what I was getting from Katharine Hepburn. I did not realize four decades was actually a real flame of first wave feminism because her mother was the head of the Connecticut woman's suffrage organization. Herb heard her aunt was also a campaigner for women's suffrage and Hepburn herself camp. He campaigned as a small child with balloons and protest votes for women votes for women etc.. So I was getting that this first impact of 1920s 1930s after women had just won the right to vote in 1920 in the. We want. We wanted to reproduce in my new book the actual page from Newsweek magazine in 1963. The letters to the editor where I had I was given the lead letter to the editor when the Soviets launched Valentino trash Koba into space. It was the first woman to enter space the time when women were banned from the American space program and I wrote a protest letter.
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